‘Come on, let’s get on.’
She did not look where she was going and trod on an adder basking on the warm stone; the adder stung her calf and slid off into the bracken as quick as variegated lightning. She felt a burning pain around the wound.
‘Yeah,’ said Jewel with deep satisfaction, as if he had expected this.
He made her lie down on the grass, took his sharp knife and cut the wound then put his mouth against it, sucked out the poison, spat and continued to suck. She clenched and unclenched her fists to feel the extraordinary sensation of his wet mouth against her skin and the pain was terrible. It was the most primitive kind of first-aid for snakebite and she was not at all sure it would do any good. He tore off the sleeve of his shirt and bound up her leg tightly.
‘Why don’t you cry when you’re hurt?’ he said.
‘I only cry out of sentiment,’ she said. Nothing half so painful had ever happened to her.
‘Lie still for a bit but then you’ll have to walk. Or else I could leave you.’ Although he was not superstitious, he was interested and perhaps relieved to see the blood on the blade of his knife.
‘Oh, no, you won’t leave me. Even if you have to carry me.’
‘There’s a change of tune, already. Lucky it was only an adder. Viperus berus,’ he added idly. The pain made her light-headed; she did not believe she had heard him give the snake its zoological name. ‘He’s a poisonous snake but others are more poisonous, though I understand this was not so before; and now it’s the cats, really, that are worst of all.’
‘I thought Barbarians had uses for cats.’
‘Who told you that one, about sewing cats inside women?’
‘My nurse. But she was a silly old woman.’
‘Cats and Out People are the worst, worse than wolves. Cats drop down from the boughs if you startle a den; they drop on your shoulders and rip you and rip your eyes, if they get the chance. My brother got his arm ripped. Then it festers. Some muck in their saliva, cats. They used to sit by firesides and purr, didn’t they, they was well known for that.’
‘All cats did that before the war,’ she said. ‘Now only Professor cats know their place. My nurse had a nice cat. It was black and all it did was catch mice and the occasional bird.’
‘You said she was a silly old woman; it was just biding its time.’
‘It was a house cat.’
‘Out People, however, have poison arrows, leprosy, pox and no sense of pride, which is terrible. How does your leg feel?’
‘Burning.’
‘Are you scared of dying?’
‘What, you mean generally?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘This minute.’
‘Not until you mentioned it. Then I felt a pang.’
‘Good, I got the venom out, then,’ he said, pleased. ‘It’s a bad symptom, it’s fatal, fear of death. And you’ve gone white, at that.’
‘Is that good or bad?’
‘Good. Otherwise you’ve have gone all the colours of the sunset and come up in blisters, too.’
The rest of the journey to the encampment had the quality of a hallucination; now not only her eyes deceived her but also her ears and sense of balance. Sometimes he would support her, sometimes leave her to seek out a path; they came to a wide clearing full of buttercups and he left her alone with the wind which blew in her face like dishevelled hair. The surface of the meadow was restless and glittered with the motion of the grass and Jewel walked through the painted buttercups like a palpable shadow. A crow turned white as it flew through the sunshine. She was in great pain. It seemed to her that sometimes he carried her but she may have been dreaming. He gave her some brown and white honeysuckle to smell, to distract her. Under the trees, they trod a labyrinth of light and shade.
‘Let me tell you a bit more about Viperus berus,’ he said or might have said. ‘The Doctor is a practical man and believes religion is a social necessity. We discuss this topic endlessly for I don’t believe in it at all but I always let him win in the end for he has his poison chest, see, and I’m cautious of his poisons. So he keeps Viperus berus in a box out of social necessity and now and then he persuades them all to worship it.’
‘Is it a phallic cult?’ she asked, or perhaps asked.
‘He hasn’t decided,’ replied Jewel, who now carried her in his arms. ‘Sometimes it’s phallic and sometimes it isn’t, depending on his mood.’
The next thing she knew, she was limping beside him, leaning heavily on his arm and the sun had moved across the sky so the beams came down with a sideways slant. She fixed her eyes above the leaves and the thousand repetitions of green forms around her, and saw the fine meshes that dapple the sky as if they were a kind of wire netting and all underneath in a huge enclosure.
‘And if you’ve got to worship something, why not the snake, which sloughs off its skin and turns up all fresh and ready for anything and can also form itself into a perfect circle by putting its tail in its mouth. And lives on air and soil. And carries poison in its mouth all the time, ready to defend itself. I’ve nothing against snakes, mind.’
‘I wish I could agree with you.’
‘Once bitten, twice shy,’ he said.
As her nurse said to her in the kitchen when she pulled the cat’s tail and the cat scratched her. Since it was a domestic cat, the scratch did not fester. She touched Jewel’s earring with her finger and made it jangle like a tinny peal of bells. They might have passed a charred circle where the Out People had lit a fire and might have passed a skeleton. Then she saw a woman in dun-coloured clothes gathering fungus. Jewel motioned Marianne to keep quiet and crept up on the woman from behind; she thought he might garotte the woman, whose scream re-echoed in the ragged rooftop of the trees, but Jewel was laughing. Dropping her mushrooms, the woman fell on her knees in front of Jewel, moaning.
‘Here, you didn’t think they’d really kill me, did you?’ he snapped at her crossly. ‘Think I’m dead, do you?’
He opened the woman’s screwed up eyes with his fingers and abruptly stuck his hand into her mouth.
‘Taste me. I’m real.’
The woman sucked his fingers greedily and began to laugh.
‘The Doctor is praying for your soul,’ she said. ‘When they came back without you, he said you were dead, like the others.’
Marianne found the woman’s speech far more clotted and impenetrable than Jewel’s; she seemed to swallow half her words before she spoke them. Jewel put his hands under the woman’s armpits, stood her on her feet and led her to Marianne. The woman wore the skull of a stoat on a plaited thong of leather round her neck and her bare feet had grown a thick, protective shell of horny skin. She wore baggy trousers, a shirt with some kind of feather embroidery on it and a waistcoat of fur; she was brown with dirt. Seeing Marianne, her eyes opened wide with fear.
‘This is the daughter of my father’s sister’s daughter,’ said Jewel. The woman’s eyes were open so wide Marianne could see a rim of white all round the irises. She hung back and would perhaps have run away if Jewel had not got such tight hold of her hand. She was ageless with travel and child-bearing.
‘This is a girl called Marianne, she’s the daughter of a Professor of History,’ said Jewel. ‘She knows which way time runs and came with me of her own free will. A snake bit her but she didn’t die, she walked on.’
His face and voice were equally inscrutable. The woman looked from Jewel to Marianne and received no comfort from either of them; Marianne was in too much pain and far too perverse to smile. Then the woman sank down again, shuddering, and made certain gestures of the hand Marianne had first seen when she was six years old and realized were intended to ward off the evil eye. Marianne wanted to tell the woman not to be so silly but was all at once too sick and dizzy.
‘Take my hand,’ she said to Jewel. ‘I’m fainting.’
He obeyed her.
‘Please get up,’ she said to the woman. ‘You make me so embarrassed.’
‘That’s a wo
rd we woodsmen don’t often hear,’ remarked Jewel. ‘Here, Annie, you heard her. Get up.’
He yawned, as if suddenly excessively bored. His cousin got up but she would not walk beside them; she loitered a few paces in the rear and muttered, apparently, spells and incantations. The trees thinned out and the wood ended abruptly. Marianne smelled a sharp stench of excrement and horses and they arrived.
Before her, she saw a beautiful valley of lush pasturage around a wide river hemmed with flowering reeds. On the other bank of this river from the place where they left the wood there lay a house of a kind Marianne had never seen before, though she had seen enough photographs and engravings to identify portions of the house’s anatomy and give them their historical names. This house was a gigantic memory of rotten stone, a compilation of innumerable forgotten styles now given some green unity by the devouring web of creeper, fur of moss and fungoid growth of rot. Wholly abandoned to decay, baroque stonework of the late Jacobean period, Gothic turrets murmurous with birds and pathetic elegance of Palladian pillared façades weathered indiscriminately together towards irreducible rubble. The forest perched upon the tumbled roofs in the shapes of yellow and purple weeds rooted in the gapped tiles, besides a few small trees and bushes. The windows gaped or sprouted internal foliage, as if the forest were as well already camped inside, there gathering strength for a green eruption which would one day burst the walls sky high back to nature. A horse or two grazed upon a terrace built in some kind of florid English Renaissance style. Upon the balustrade of this terrace were many pocked and armless statues in robes, or nude and garlanded. These looked like the petrified survivors of a malign fête champêtre ended long ago, in catastrophe.
Underneath the terrace was a brilliant clump of rose trees, once a formal garden. All the roses were blossoming on tall, thorny trees which knotted together and shook down petals. Everywhere she looked were men, women, children and horses. A few half-naked children sat on the banks of the river and fished. Mangy dogs scavenged in an enormous midden of bones and liquid dung which spread out from the side of the house like a huge stain. They picked their way down the sides of the valley. A boy was breaking in a colt beside a pile of sticks. When he saw the three figures on the other side of the river, he let out a great whoop. The colt bucked and he fell off.
‘That’s my brother,’ said Jewel. ‘That’s the youngest. That’s the prettiest, he’s precious.’
A dam in his heart must have broken with relief and joy for she saw he was crying. The boy plunged through the waters, coming to meet him. The children dropped their fishing rods and some ran into the house to fetch their parents but others threw themselves into the water to cross the river straight away. It seemed the whole camp was coming to meet Jewel, leaving every task, running as fast as their feet could carry them but the youngest brother arrived first and embraced the eldest, kissing his mouth, cheek, and eyes.
‘Precious,’ said Jewel. ‘My precious.’ Not for some time did Marianne realize that Precious was the boy’s name; the Barbarians used whatever forenames they found lying about, as long as they glittered and shone and attracted them.
All around her she saw the behaviour of the woman in the wood repeated over and over again. First, they looked at Jewel with trepidation, in case he was really dead but had returned all the same, and then they saw he left footprints in the ground and was substantial and kissed his brother with no harm done so they swarmed around him, all trying to hug some part of him, and everybody was crying with joy, for they wore their hearts upon their faces, an openness to which she was not accustomed. But when they saw Marianne, they drew back. Jewel let go of her hand to embrace his brother, who was about Marianne’s age; she stood still and let him go on, down to the river, and the tribe surged with him and left her behind.
Men, women and children continued to stream from the house. A brown, naked child, sodden from the river, bounced up into Jewel’s arms and he hugged her. She wondered if this could be his own daughter for he kissed her with the greatest affection and laughed. The ground was marshy and gave beneath Marianne’s feet.
Some of the people glanced back at her and made vague, fluttering, protective gestures. The sun was shining but she felt very cold. A little boy about four years old made a sudden dart at her and ripped a strip off her skirt before she could stop him. He retreated a few yards, squatted down and chewed at the relic as if expecting some immediate magic effect from it while he shot her glances of be-wilderment and fright. But most of the tribe ignored her completely. They all began to wade back across the river and she was left alone, for Jewel appeared to have quite forgotten her since he was so glad to be home.
The middle-aged woman she had seen on the road came from the house. She was enveloped in a large apron of astonishing whiteness and her sleeves were rolled up, revealing forearms of great strength and size. She ran along the terrace and down the crumbling steps with the flapping, ungainly run of a fat woman; although Marianne was so far away from her, she could see the woman’s grey hair uncoiling from the bun on top of her head. The people parted to let her through and she hugged Jewel harder than any of them. Then she looked across the river and Marianne saw the clean woman’s forefinger pointing at her. Jewel at once turned and hurried back.
‘You forgot me,’ she said, accusingly.
‘I was overcome,’ he replied. ‘It’s not every day you rise from the dead. Can you still walk?’
But she found it very difficult to start walking again once she had stopped. He carried her over the river and set her down in front of the clean woman, whose name was Mrs Green. She was his foster-mother. She had a broad, doughy face covered with freckles. She kissed Marianne; she smelled of baking.
‘Don’t be scared,’ she said. ‘He’s not a bad boy at heart; none of them are bad boys, in spite of appearances.’
The little girl clambered up Jewel’s trunk as simply as if it were that of a tree and sat on his shoulders, pulling his hair. He slapped her. Marianne was now so dizzy the brown faces danced around her like dead leaves. When the Barbarians saw Mrs Green had not turned to stone as a result of her kiss, they clustered round Marianne with a braver curiosity and she felt moist, exploring hands on her arms, legs and bare neck and somebody tugging at the crude bandage on her leg.
‘Leave her alone,’ said Jewel. ‘The snake bit her but she didn’t die.’
He gave them this information contemptuously but they hushed and drew away from her. The crowd now began gradually to melt away, going back to former occupations such as tanning hide, sharpening knives and making pots, while Jewel, his foster-mother, his half-brother and Mrs Green’s grandchild, the little girl, went towards the house.
‘And Joseph,’ said Jewel. ‘How is Joseph?’
‘Blue all over,’ said Precious. ‘It’s no joke, I can tell you.’
‘Dead by night, I reckon,’ said Mrs Green. ‘Oh, my poor boy. And such pain and Donally won’t leave him alone nor ease him, either.’
‘And him only twenty-two years old,’ said Jewel. ‘The first of us to go.’
Mrs Green put her hand confidentially on Jewel’s arm and her voice sank to a whisper.
‘Jewel, my love, ease him.’
‘I won’t kill him!’ he said.
Marianne stumbled and cried out. They ignored her.
‘You mean I should put him out of his misery like a horse with a broken leg, ease him with death, is it? With a knife, or a gun, which would be best, do you think?’
‘It’s a brother’s duty,’ said Mrs Green sententiously. ‘You don’t need to lose your temper, do you. I’d do it myself, but it’s no job for a woman and, besides, Donally won’t let me into the room.’
Jewel changed moods with extreme swiftness. He stood in the benign sunshine and, though tears of joy were still drying on his cheeks, he exuded the bleakest despair.
‘I won’t kill him,’ he said. ‘No, never.’
‘Ease him, my love,’ she said, as if she had not heard him. ‘You
know what I mean.’
The small group went on walking towards the house.
‘Such pain you never saw,’ said the old woman. ‘And calling out longingly for death to come. It is your duty; he is your responsibility.’
Jewel put his hand over her mouth to shut her up.
‘Take care of the girl, then. Give her something to eat and put her to bed or she’ll be ill, too, and what’s to be done, then?’
‘I’m coming with you to make sure,’ said Mrs Green. ‘Didn’t I feed Joseph my own milk when he was a baby, like I did you? Isn’t he flesh of my flesh, almost? Here, our Jen, take the girl up to my room and make her lie down.’
The old woman and the two young men broke into a run without a backward glance and went up the stairs to the terrace to vanish through the grandiloquent doorway of the house, where a worm-eaten door hung open off its hinges. Marianne was left alone with the child, who plumped down on the grass beside her with a sigh. She wore nothing but a daisy chain. She had ringworm.
‘You’re from the Professors,’ she told Marianne firmly. She had a very deep voice for so young a child.
‘Yes,’ said Marianne.
‘You killed my father,’ said Jen accusingly.
‘Not I, myself,’ said Marianne with a contraction of the heart she did not understand. ‘They did it out of self-protection.’
‘He dressed up and went away and he didn’t come back and the Professors had killed him and baked him and eaten him with salt,’ said Jen firmly. ‘That’s what my mother said.’
‘That’s what they all say,’ said Marianne, but she did not pacify the child, whose face contorted as she spat. The gob of saliva clung to Marianne’s skirt like a weird gemstone. Jen walked away with dignity. There was an open sore on her backside. Marianne was sick with pain and alone. She dragged herself up the staircase in front of the house by the rotten stone handrail. Her eyes kept misting over and she thought she saw furred animals inside the front door but she was mistaken; all that met her when she entered the house was the reek of open sewers.
Heroes and Villains Page 5